On Turning 34: How I'm Learning to Live a Life of Surrender
“The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment. Not seeking, not expecting, she is present, and can welcome all things.”
Is it really a birthday in your thirties without an existential crisis?
No. It’s not.
I read somewhere that your thirties is the decade to build the foundation of your life.
I thought that was your twenties.
I don’t know. Who’s deciding what these decades are supposed to be anyway?
My twenties was the decade of questioning everything I believed to be true. Of challenging the status quo and deciding for myself how I was going to live my life. Of backpacking the world alone. Of losing myself and finding God. Of getting completely lost in that messy sht show and getting really intimate with my anxiety. Of not having a damn clue about anything.
My thirties — well, maybe it is the decade I’m building the foundation of my life? The foundation of a life of surrender. The decade where I pick up those messy pieces from my twenties only to let it all go. The decade where I step fully into hopelessness, detachment and observance.
“My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself - because it was.” - Michael A. Singer, The Surrender Experiment
Four years ago, in a shabby room in a beautifully manicured ashram located in the heart of a small but buzzing town in central India, I picked up a book that changed the direction of my life.
Michael A. Singer’s, The Surrender Experiment.
I knew within the first few pages that this was the way I had to live my life — a life of surrender. I was going to focus on my spiritual practice and just let life bring me what I need.
Oh my dear Janelle. If only it was that easy.
I spent years trying to intellectualize this concept of surrendering. Is there a step-by-step guide to surrendering? Maybe there's another book out there that cracked the surrender code and can tell me exactly how to surrender? There’s gotta be something, anything that gives me THE answer — right?
But with time I came to realize there just isn’t. Surrendering is a uniquely individual experience, one for those who are tired of chasing the desires of the mind. One for those who understood what Buddha meant when he said, “Desires cause suffering.”
It’s a painfully slow, drawn out process.
“Am I better off making up an alternate reality in my mind and then fighting with reality to make it be my way, or am I better off letting go of what I want and serving the same forces of reality that managed to create the entire perfection of the universe around me?” - Michael A. Singer, The Surrender Experiment
It’s not a passive one like many like to think. Surrendering is extremely active. It requires an incredibly acute presence, an unshakable faith in life, and a solid relationship with something bigger than you.
And it’s radical. Pretty frikin radical.
Ultimately, surrendering requires letting go of everything the mind thinks it needs to make it happy. This letting go can only happen when we learn how to detach from the mind and observe it.
Because we are not the mind. We are the one that observes it. We are the observer.
This practice of detaching from the mind, observing it, not chasing desires, recognizing when the mind is craving or avoiding, letting go and completely surrendering is anything but passive.
The older I get, the more and more I want nothing more than to surrender. There’s a part of me, a very quiet, still, guarded part of me that just knows.
She knows that chasing the mind’s desire will only lead to a temporary hit of dopamine. She knows that the only purpose she has in this world is to awaken from the dream that is this earth experience. She knows that this is her journey — her only journey.
With that, this little part of me just innately knows that surrendering really is the only way to get everything I truly want — inner peace, inner joy, inner love.
“Each of us actually believes that things should be the way we want them, instead of being the natural result of all the forces of creation.” ― Michael A. Singer, The Surrender Experiment
But how? How to surrender?
That really is the hard part. It takes time to decondition and move from a place of being an active participant to an observer of the mind. In order to do that, we have to completely relinquish the mind from making decisions.
We must first learn to watch the mind as it tries to decide — to catch it and stop ourselves from making decisions from the mind.
The best way to do this is to live our Human Design and follow our strategy and authority. Let your inner authority make decisions. Let life bring you what is correct. And just watch the mind. Just watch the movie of life.
With this Human Design guidebook of sorts, we can watch the mind, let go of its need to control and develop this trusting relationship with life.
We can surrender.
“Could it really be so hard to just let it rain when it rains and be sunny when it’s sunny without complaining about it? Apparently the mind can’t do it: Why did it have to rain today? It always rains when I don’t want it to. It had all week to rain; it’s just not fair.” ― Michael A. Singer, The Surrender Experiment
In Michael’s book he said the first thing he surrendered was the weather. He stopped checking the weather. This sort of blew my mind because we don’t even realize how much the mind is still trying to be in control when we check the weather everyday.
What if we just woke up and accepted the weather that day? What if we just surrendered to what Mother Nature presents to us without knowing? What if we let go of the weather and then let go of something else?
Four years ago I stopped checking the weather.
These days I’ve been surrendering my weekend plans. I just stopped planning weekends. I see what invitations life brings me. I wait, I wait, I wait some more. I observe. I allow. I accept. I follow my strategy and authority. And I surrender.
I also stopped planning “my next trip”, which was a vicious cycle of control I was in. I would obsessively plan these trips, which completely took me away from the present moment, and created this false sense of happiness which only ever existed in the future, never in the now.
And now I’m surrendering my 34th birthday.
My birthday is my favorite day. I look forward to it every year. I savor every second of this day. I’m usually galavanting in another country. Anywhere but Miami. I’d rather be alone in a foreign land than in my hometown.
This year life brought me to Miami. I mean, don’t get me wrong. A week ago I was checking flights to Portugal, desperately clinging on to any hope I could scrape up for a birthday abroad.
But this year something within me felt different. I caught myself doing what I so eloquently do — following my mind’s desire. Planning a trip. Planning a getaway. Planning a runaway.
Planning. Planning. And planning.
So I did the thing I preach — I surrendered and let go of the birthday plans.
“Accept the purification power of life's flow.” ― Michael A. Singer, The Surrender Experiment
This year for my birthday I’ll be completely alone in Miami with nothing planned.
A year ago I would have been panicking. But today, there’s something about this hopeless birthday that feels right. It feels good. It feels peaceful. It feels lighter.
Surrendering is this, I guess.
I always thought living a surrendered life was this grand act of surrendering the entirety of life. Which is probably why it felt like such a monumental act I couldn’t quite figure out. Because how does one just surrender their entire life?
They start by surrendering the weather. Then their weekend plans. Then their birthday plans. Then maybe they surrender tomorrow. And the next day. And the next week. And the next month. Until eventually they surrender their future.
And this is how you live a life of surrender. One little surrender at a time.
“That was the essence of my experiment with life: if it’s down to a matter of preference—life wins.” - Michael A. Singer, The Surrender Experiment
I surrender because I’m tired. Exhausted. Of being so hard on myself. Of the constant shame and judgement that comes with thinking a better me is somewhere in a far fetched future. A future where I have the perfect career, live in the perfect city, am married to the perfect man, have the perfect wardrobe, and have the perfect endless flow of money.
Tired.
Exhausted. Of beating myself up because I can’t ever get there — to that far fetched future. Tired of being so damn hard on myself all the damn time. Tired of chasing, striving, reaching, only to feel like it’s never enough.
Tired.
Exhausted. Of feeling like where I’m at in this moment isn’t enough. Of feeling like I’m just not enough.
There has to be another way to live. There has to be more peace and calm in this human experience. There has to be less suffering, more releasing. There has to be less resistance, more acceptance.
There is.
It’s called surrendering.
